Perma-win in the regular expression decipher game

My first real programming job as a freelance have involved a fair share of regular expressions, and I constantly found myself working on a mess that would only stay readable in my mind for a few minutes at a time. Once it left, I had to play the decipher game to get it back - wasting several minutes every time.

As I care about code readability, for the sake of maintenance and aesthetics, it troubled me. Especially because I know it doesn't have to be this hard. Simple solution emerge by thinking long and hard. I obviously hadn't thought long or hard enough.